LA’s Underground Power Broker

Illustrations by Edward T. SandersTony Adams and his partner, Gerry Wehr, smelled something fishy when they arrived in Los Angeles back in 1994 to arrest Carlos Vignali, the target of one of Minnesota's biggest drug cases. The Minneapolis narcotics officers had caught the 22-year-old Vignali on a wiretap conspiring to distribute crack cocaine in the Twin Cities. They checked into the Hilton on Grand Avenue under names known only to their local contacts at the DEA.

Within hours, they say, they received a call from defense lawyer Anthony Brooklier, who represented an alleged associate of Vignali. Strangely aware of how to contact the visiting officers, Brooklier, a high-paid mouthpiece for celebrities and accused gangsters, wanted to know what the officers were up to. Soon they would discover that Brooklier's client had fingered not just Carlos Vignali but also Vignali's father, Carlos "Horacio" Vignali, as major drug traffickers.

Brooklier wasn't the only one who seemed ahead of the game. A local DEA agent told Adams and Wehr right where to look for the younger Vignali and showed them written statements offered by Brooklier's client, who described in detail how the elder Vignali allegedly ran drugs out of his auto-body shop on Figueroa Street, near the L.A. Convention Center.

The DEA report intrigued the Minnesota cops. During their four-day stay in Los Angeles, after taking in a Dodger game, they staked out the body shop and quickly grew suspicious about father Vignali. But they returned to Minnesota with more questions than answers. It would be eight years before a congressional investigation produced DEA documents, one dating as far back as 1976, that described Horacio Vignali as an alleged underworld figure who boasted of trafficking in heroin.

Looking back, the Minneapolis officers say they got an odd vibe when a Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputy went looking for the younger Vignali at his father's place of business, only to be scolded later by his supervisor, now Sheriff Lee Baca, for harassing the elder Vignali. Baca had been friends with the father since 1991, when they met during Richard Riordan's mayoral campaign. "Who sweats an officer for trying to serve a federal arrest warrant, and why?" asks Adams. Baca ended up calling the father and talked him into having his son drop by the auto-body shop for questioning; he came in and was arrested. He would serve only six years of a 15-year term before receiving clemency from President Clinton in 2001.

Today Adams and Wehr are back in the grind of smaller investigations in their relatively quiet northern state and are still steaming about their brush with the harsh realities of big-city law enforcement more than a decade ago. And Horacio Vignali — except to downtown insiders who are watching his real estate empire grow — is publicly shunned. He has been relegated to the history books for his effort to gain his son's early release from prison, which drew support from a cadre of L.A. politicians, including Mayor-elect Antonio Villaraigosa. Splashed on news pages four years ago in what became known as "Pardongate," the story was reduced to a soundbite in Jim Hahn's 2001 campaign, when he attacked Villaraigosa for coming to the aid of an unsavory drug dealer.

Now, as Villaraigosa prepares to lead the city, many other officials who supported the clemency effort remain players in the downtown political establishment. And so does father Vignali, one of the most powerful property owners of a nice chunk of downtown real estate primed to be developed in the continuing remake of downtown Los Angeles.

Today Vignali is where he has been for 30 years, in the South Park area of downtown, where he owns parking lots and warehouses in the shadows of the Convention Center and Staples Center. With real estate hotter than ever in that part of town, and the conversion of industrial property in vogue, his longstanding ownership of parcels in key locations gives him an important role in mapping the future of Los Angeles. Even more so considering that media mogul and reclusive billionaire Philip Anschutz is building a sports-and-entertainment district in South Park that his company, Anschutz Entertainment Group, is touting as the next Times Square. Such good fortune is far more than what Adams and Wehr think the Vignalis deserve.

Vignali's money is no good in politics anymore, but business is still business, and he still has a few alliances with some who have access to City Hall. Vignali, a man who might have stayed below the radar forever if it weren't for his drug-dealing son, has already brokered one land deal with Anschutz.

Yet mention of the name Vignali draws uncomfortable silences, blank stares and unreturned phone calls from many politicians and some of the most active real estate brokers working downtown's gold mine. Which might seem strange given the elder Vignali's success in business and his knack for acquiring property that the city finds desirable. Having been part of a nationwide scandal, the Vignalis are wedged somewhere between legitimacy and infamy. They remain somewhat a mystery. They did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this story.